Telephones offer an effective means of enabling not only two-way conversations among individuals and groups of individuals, but also one-way broadcasts from a single host to many participants In a typical two-way conversation, two individuals may utilize a telephone network for a two-way conversation. The first individual may directly communicate voice over the telephone network to a second individual and vice versa
A more sophisticated method of two-way conversation is the telephone conference In a telephone conference, groups of individuals may coordinate a conferencing session in which bi-directional conversation is enabled through the use of mixing technologies Each of the members of the group typically connects to a central mixing, service that transmits the conversation to each member Telephone conferences enhance the ability of groups of individuals to communicate with each other.
A third popular utilization of the telephone is telephone broadcasts. As opposed to bi-directional two-way communication, telephone broadcasts provide a mechanism for a single host to communicate to multiple participants. Telephone broadcastilne, is particularly useful for distance learning, where students who cannot physically attend a lecture can hear the lecture broadcast over the telephone
Ogdon et al in U.S. Pat. No. 6,161,137 entitled “Method and system for providing a presentation on a network”, describe a method of telephone and video broadcasting in which interactive and/or real-time presentations may be broadcast to multiple participants Each participant may have access to a data communication network eg the Internet, and/or a telephony network for voice communication In Ogdon et al the participants access a broadcast that originates from content servers, such as steaming web servers
Recently, with the advent of the Internet, another method for enabling multiple participants to converse has emerged Internet conference calls have become an increasinly popular and effective means of communication
There are many conference call services available through the Internet and telephone, such as Spiderphone.com, Inc Spiderphone's system provides advanced conferencing features, such as the ability to view a list of who is participating in the conference through a web browser and to send web pages, PowerPoint files or any other suitable types of file to conference participants.
One of the challenges facing developers of telephony applications is to determine a suitable application environment. VoiceXML has recently emerged as a standard in the field. VoiceXML is a markup language which enables VoiceXML web server platform developers to make information accessible to telephone users in the same manner that regular web servers provide information to web users